The Will In The Animal

Why won't the acclaimedly intelligent beings of the animal world,

Called the humans,

Eventually understand the language of their fellow creatures?

What for example the message of two cute icebears were,
Who, amidst the dreadful melting away,
From underneath their bear feet, of
Their ice-shaped habitat on the Polar Cap,
Experienced already for over two generations,
Took to such great pains as to

Embarking on a hazardous
Kind of last-chance kamikaze trip of
Hundreds of kilometers,
Partially swimming, partially afloat
Atop drifting ice blocks,
All the way from Greenland to Iceland:

'It is you, you presumptive two-legged lords on the planet,
None else but
You,
With these magic mirrors of your killer-blink-eye hanging
Around your proud necks,

Who art guilty of the reckless diminishing of
Our home in the polar ice!

Since you are ultimately bound for extinguishing us altogether:

Shorten this painful life now,
Shoot, if you can, now! '!

People's lives are led in this magic mix of our world,
So you say,
By intuitions from consequences
We choose to involuntarily take part in,

And you say,
For a major part
People's lives are led
By all these fair & unfair provisions of Providence
We inevitably take shares in,

And by intimidations and by acts of aggression for self-maintenance,
So you say, our lives are led, too.

I once asked a modern Socrates about this thing,
One bald-headed bold-hatted clear-minded thinker
With a prickly animal instinct in his head -

One also you might have met already once
In a tiny far away forest ville.

He remarked to my questions:
'But where is the will of the animal in this concept? '

Well, well well, I said, and am pondering now:

'What makes any whale suffer to go back up the Thames again, after a lapse of 92 turns of the sun? '

I now feel the winds of the will in modern scientific man
When he spreads
'The life of a whale wistfully straying in people's waterways
Must be that of one misled! '


Erhard Hans Josef Lang